Abrego Garcia pushes to toss criminal charges he says amount to 'vindictive' prosecution

Mistakenly deported man Kilmar Abrego Garcia is moving to dismiss his criminal case in Tennessee, arguing he was the subject of a vindictive and selective prosecution by the Trump administration.

The motion is filed by those who feel they have been unfairly singled out by prosecutors and charged when others similarly situated would not have been. 

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been singled out by the United States government. It is obvious why. And it is not because of the seriousness of his alleged conduct. Nor is it because he poses some unique threat to this country. Instead, Mr. Abrego was charged because he refused to acquiesce in the government’s violation of his due process rights,” his attorneys wrote.

“Rather than fix its mistake and return Mr. Abrego to the United States, the government fought back at every level of the federal court system. And at every level, Mr. Abrego won. This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”

The filing details what they see as a number of irregularities in the case, from a lead prosecutor resigning over concerns the case was being brought for political reasons to the government’s star witness in the case being given work authorization after a history of being repeatedly deported.

Abrego Garcia, who was protected from removal to his native El Salvador in 2019 by an immigration judge, was nonetheless sent to a notorious megaprison in the country in a move a Justice Department attorney said was due to an administrative error. The department later fired the attorney who made the admission.

After months of legal battles by his family to secure his return — including claims by the Trump administration that it had no power to retrieve him from the Salvadoran government — Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

Abrego Garcia is currently facing human trafficking charges related to a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, during which he was pulled over for speeding and seen transporting men without luggage.

The indictment alleges Abrego Garcia falsely told the officer he was driving construction workers from St. Louis, but he was actually on one of his trips transporting migrants without legal status.

The latest filing from Abrego Garcia’s legal team notes that he was neither ticketed nor charged as a result of the stop and that the Tennessee Highway Patrol never further investigated the matter.

“The traffic stop took on new importance for the government in April and early May of this year, when it had the newfound desire to punish Mr. Abrego. Thus, it became the centerpiece of the government’s fledgling investigation,” they wrote.

The filing notes that the Trump administration made deals with those now accusing Abrego Garcia of human trafficking, including a man who was not legally present in the U.S. and had been repeatedly deported.

“The government has gone to extreme lengths to make a criminal case against Mr. Abrego. The government located and sought cooperation from multiple alleged co-conspirators who have already been sentenced, and who are cooperating down on Mr. Abrego, allegedly a mere driver in a smuggling conspiracy. The government’s star cooperator is a convicted leader of a human smuggling business who has three other felony convictions and was deported five times,” they wrote.

“The government arranged for him to be released early from a 30-month sentence to a halfway house, notwithstanding his five prior deportations, and to receive work authorization, all as an inducement to cooperate against Mr. Abrego, an alleged subordinate.”

The filing also relies heavily on the whistleblower disclosures of the fired Justice Department attorney, Erez Reuveni.

Those documents show Trump administration officials looking for ways to cast Abrego Garcia as a gang member even as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials struggled to do so.

“Within days of Mr. Abrego’s complaint, on March 27, officials discussed the possibility of requesting his return from El Salvador; they also discussed the possibility of claiming that he was a member of MS-13. But ICE officials struggled to provide evidence supporting that claim,” Abrego Garcia’s attorneys wrote.

“Indeed, when an official from the State Department remarked that records purportedly supporting ICE’s MS-13-affiliation claim contained ‘a lot of info on that incident being pulled over in Tennessee that led to no citation, and very little on why he’s believed to be a member of MS-13,’ an ICE official responded ‘I think this may be all they have.’”